Postal (video game)

Postal is a shooter with isometric projection. The gameplay and interface are similar to first-person shooters of the time, but not on all counts.

Movement is always relative to the orientation of the player character (named "The Postal Dude"). The player, therefore, must always be aware of the direction the character is facing, which can be difficult to some players on the isometric maps.

There are eight weapon slots, each with a fixed amount of maximum ammo. The default weapon is a weak machine gun with unlimited ammo. Although it serves no practical purpose, the player can conceal their weapons by pressing the tilde key.

A man referred to simply as the "Postal Dude" has been evicted from his home. He believes the United States Air Force is releasing an airborne agent upon his town of Paradise and that he is the only individual unaffected by the ensuing "hate plague". He fights his way from his house to an Air Force Base through various locations, including a ghetto, train station, trailer park, truck stop, and an ostrich farm. During the course of the gameplay, a voice in the protagonist's head (voiced by Rick Hunter) can be heard taunting his victims through cryptic absurdity, often through consecutive kills or when switching through the player's arsenal.

After raiding the Air Force Base, he is shown attempting to massacre an elementary school. Despite his best efforts, his weapons have no effect on the children. Suffering a mental breakdown amidst innocent laughter, he finds himself restrained in a mental asylum as hellish images cover the screen: A body bound to chains in a corridor, the protagonist in a straitjacket curled in the fetal position; a close-up of his face, covered in bindings; and the door to his cell numbered 593.

A disembodied voice, possibly a psychologist, gives a report on the protagonist's mental state. He suggests that the stress of urban life may have been the root cause of his rampage, prompting him to "go postal". The lack of any mentions of military interference with the civilian population implies that the Postal Dude's murders were the result of his own paranoid delusions. Amid distorted audio, the psychologist gives a final remark: "We may never know exactly what set him off, but rest assured we will have plenty of time to study him". Upon completion of the credits, manic cackling can be heard as the screen fades to black.

Due to the controversy surrounding the game's release, along with numerous American school shootings in the years following, the ending was changed in Postal Redux. The developers stated that they changed the ending because school shootings had lost the shock value they had when the original Postal released. Replacing the elementary school vision is the player witnessing the burial of an unknown person in a decaying field, widely believed to be his own funeral. Completion of the game on the hardest difficulty features the inclusion of an unknown male and female mourning over the grave as it descends. Both outcomes prompt a similar mental breakdown and an identical asylum cutscene, though consisting of animated shots over the original release's still image artwork.

By the mid-1990s, Arizona-based work for hire game development company Riedel Software Productions (RSP) had grown creatively exhausted after over a decade of producing licensed children's titles for Children's Television Workshop, Hanna-Barbera, The Walt Disney Company, and others. Desiring to create original games the developers would want to play themselves, RSP established the Running with Scissors (RWS) label to produce mature titles under a different name.^[3][4][5] RSP was split into three development teams; one worked on a later-canceled tie-in game for the 1993 film Free Willy, another worked on a product for an academic publisher, and the RWS team of seven people began development of a self-funded shooter game in March 1996.^[6][3][5][7] Inspired by the fast-paced shooting gameplay of the Robotron: 2084 (1982) cabinet playable in RSP's office, the game took on an isometric top-down perspective to differentiate it from various first-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) that RWS felt were oversaturating the PC gaming market.^[5][8][4] RWS sought to make the game as outrageous as possible, conceiving it as a "murder simulator" featuring purely human enemies rather than aliens or zombies.^[9][10]

Early titles considered for the game were The Last Nail and The Postman Always Shoots Twice, a reference to the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice. A shortened version of the latter title, Postal, was pitched by designer Steve Wik. The team liked the name despite not knowing what it meant, with RWS CEO Vince Desi noting the popularity of one-word video game titles such as Doom and Unreal.^[9] The working title stuck and became an inside joke, with the team later realizing the common use of the slang "going postal" in reference to workplace violence committed by disgruntled postal workers in the United States.^[11]

RWS kept Postal's plot largely vague to focus on delivering immersive gameplay, leaving the details up to player interpretation.^[5][4] Under art director Randy Briley, the game took on a darker, brooding visual direction. The player character, a gun-toting man designed by Briley, was intentionally given no backstory and obscured in shadows and filters in artwork to allow players to fully impose themselves onto the character. When Vince Desi realized during an early interview that the character was nameless, he coined the "Postal Dude" nickname. The Dude's coat was originally black by default, but RWS discovered during playtesting that the Dude was difficult to track onscreen in the dark levels and among other characters. To compensate, the Dude's default coat color was changed to red for the game's initial launch, much to the team's dissatisfaction. The comedic "demon" lines heard from the Dude's mind throughout gameplay were voiced by Tucson radio personality Rick Hunter.^[1]

Postal was developed with RSPiX, a cross-platform game engine developed by RSP and previously used in the company's licensed edutainment games.^[12][5][13] The game's soundtrack and audio effects were composed by Christian A. Salyer under his production studio, Sound Element.^[14]

Running with Scissors first revealed Postal to the public in March 1997.^[15] In May 1997, it was announced that Ripcord Games, a new entertainment label of Panasonic Interactive Media, would be publishing the game.^[16][17] A public beta demo of Postal was released online on July 21, 1997, and was playable for a month before expiring in August.^[18][19][20]

The full version of Postal released to retail in North America for Mac OS and Windows on September 24, 1997.^[21][22] A censored European version of the game was released by Take-Two Interactive in October 1997, removing the ability to execute enemies, the marching band in the "Parade of Disasters" level, and the elementary school post-game sequence.^[23][24] Running with Scissors would release a European-only downloadable patch to restore the censored content.^[25] Postal was released in Japan by MicroMouse on January 30, 1998, later receiving an updated edition that re-dubbed all character audio in Japanese and added two exclusive levels, "Tokyo" and "Osaka".^[26][27] Like the European release, this version of the game was censored, removing all blood and once again omitting the elementary school sequence.

An add-on to the game titled Special Delivery released on August 28, 1998, featuring four new levels and additional multiplayer features and characters.^[28][29] Postal Plus, an edition of Postal that bundled both the original game and the Special Delivery add-on as one, released in May 2000. It was re-released in August 2003 as Postal: Classic and Uncut, with the addition of a demo for Postal 2.^[30][31]

A Linux port of Postal was released by Loki Entertainment on October 29, 2001,^[32] and a Mac OS X port by Ryan C. Gordon was released on July 26, 2005.^[33]

Postal was released digitally on GOG.com in April 2009^[34][35] and later Steam in March 2013,^[36] followed by updates that improved compatibility with modern systems and introduced widescreen and modern controller support. Due to compatibility issues, the multiplayer and level editor features seen in the original release were removed.^[37]

In April 2015, an Android port of Postal was rejected from both the Google Play Store and the Amazon Appstore for "gratuitous violence". RWS found the decision hypocritical, pointing out that violent games such as Grand Theft Auto III and Carmageddon were available on both platforms.^[38][39] Amazon would later reverse its ban, allowing the port to release to the Appstore on April 10.^[40]

In August 2015, RWS announced that it would release the source code of the game "if someone promises to port it to the Dreamcast".^[41] In June 2016, RWS gave the source code to a community developer who ported the game to the OpenPandora handheld.^[42][43] On December 28, 2016, the source code was released on Bitbucket under the GNU GPL-2.0-only license.^[44] An anniversary update with community-contributed improvements was released in November 2017, restoring legacy game features like multiplayer via LAN and the two exclusive levels from the Japanese release. The game became freeware on digital platforms in December 2019, and the source code was republished to GitHub in February 2024.^[45][46]

In February 2022, a Dreamcast port of Postal developed by Dan Redfield and licensed by Running with Scissors was announced by independent publisher Wave Game Studios, releasing on June 2, 2022.^[47][48] The source code of the port was also released.^[49]

NPD Techworld, a firm that tracked sales in the United States,^[56] reported 49,036 units sold of Postal by December 2002.^[57]

Next Generation reviewed the PC version of the game, rating it four stars out of five, and stated that "Overall, Postal is a title that breaks absolutely no new ground, but its tongue-in-cheek shooting action comes together to form a well-above-average shooter that adds to the genre."^[53]

Postal received mixed reviews from critics. It holds a Metacritic score of 56/100.^[50] GameSpot's Mark East gave the game a 6.6/10 score and commented: "The lack of longevity in the single-player mode and the simplistic multiplayer options make Postal a moderately fun ride, at best."^[52] On regards to The Postal Dude's aggressive personality East comments on the Postal Dude's phrases from his diary, which indicate "something's not quite right in Postal Dude's noggin".^[58]

In a retrospective, GamingOnLinux reviewer Hamish Paul Wilson gave the game 7/10, commenting that "there is no denying that Postal has some faults even when compared to some of the other games that were released around the same time as it, and time has definitely not been very kind to the title itself. But the concepts that the game explores, the ideas being expressed, and much of their actual implementations are just so interesting and compelling that one can still actually look past many of these faults and see the hidden gem that lies underneath."^[59]

The reviewer from Pyramid #30 (March/April 1998) stated that "Many people have thought the premise for the game is sick. Well, it is. But, that's what makes it fun. There's no quest for secret, lost treasure. There's no time-clock ticking away as you try desperately to save the world. There's no alien spaceships or fantastical powers. There's just good old fashioned, psychotic violence - something that our mass media entertainment powers have been bringing us on prime time for years."^[60]

A sequel to the game, Postal 2, was released in 2003. Director Uwe Boll bought the movie rights for the series and produced a film of the same name. Two additional sequels, Postal III and Postal 4: No Regerts, were released in 2011 and 2022, respectively.

Running with Scissors developed a remake of Postal, titled Postal Redux, using Unreal Engine 4. The project was announced as Postal: Redux in November 2014, then targeting a 2015 release for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.^[61][62] In addition to these platforms, Running with Scissors announced Postal Redux as coming to PlayStation 4 in February 2016.^[63] The Microsoft Windows version was released on May 20, 2016, while Linux, macOS, and PlayStation 4 versions were scheduled for a later release.^[64] The PlayStation 4 version was canceled by June 2017, with Jaret Schachter of Running with Scissors blaming a lack of sales of the PC version.^[65] MD Games ported Postal Redux to the Nintendo Switch, releasing it via the Nintendo eShop on October 16, 2020.^[66] The PlayStation 4 version was later uncancelled and released on March 5, 2021.^[67]